Vision, Like Love, Is an Action. Activate Your Vision to Bring Alignment and Success.
Key Takeaways:
- In an era where 96% of workers are looking for a new job, gut feelings trump transactions.
- Company growth comes through those who align with your company’s core values.
- Your company values should closely align with your personal values; leading should be done by example and with authenticity.
- Buzzwords mean nothing when it comes to values. It’s walking the talk that counts.
As a business leader, you understand the importance of the core values of your organization. They serve as the touchstone that binds together people with a shared purpose, principles, and vision. However, defining your values isn’t enough. They must be firmly established in your company’s culture and embraced by the employees who make up that culture if they are to drive your overall business goals.
At the core of any business are its people. Hiring the right people and sharing your core values with them brings them into alignment with your vision, grows your company, and creates efficiencies. It’s about managing people, not processes – bringing core values to life.
In 2023, plainly and precisely outlining core values and then sharing them with everyone in the organization can boost growth, improve recruiting and retention, and increase the quality of output. Your core values could be the key to your success. Here are some tips to share your core values across your organization.
Alignment requires connection
It’s a fact: 96% of workers are looking for a new job in 2023. Leaders are scrambling for ways to keep their best and brightest and recruit the same to replace them if they leave. Modern employment is different from that of the past when employer-employee relationships were transactional. For today’s workers, salary is important, but it’s weighed heavily against company purpose and values. What they look for is alignment, and that’s what you should be looking for, too.
Cold logic is becoming a thing of the past – feelings and intuition have now come to the fore: people want a sense of belonging that alignment brings and tend to go more with their gut than logic. Employees who align with your vision are those you want, and you should quite happily accept rejection from those who don’t.
To find those who are aligned, you must clearly define your purpose, values, and story to develop a clear and consistent message: this is what your like-minded people are looking for and what will connect with their emotions – their gut. This emotional connection is what will make your business and your people thrive.
To bring your core values to life means they have to be real, you must use the active voice, and you have to walk the talk.
It’s about vision, not aspiration. It’s about verbs, not nouns.
Aspiration is often confused with vision, but they are not one and the same. Aspiration is a desire for an outcome. Vision is a clear view of how to achieve the outcome. Aspiration is wonderful, but it’s vision that brings core values to life. And to be truly effective and shared in an authentic way, your company values should closely align with your personal values. Understanding yourself as a person brings a greater understanding of yourself as a leader and allows you to embody core values.
Think about what it means for someone to become part of your team. Perhaps your core values include integrity, teamwork, and communication. But take the time to look again. What do those words mean? Without activation, they mean nothing or mean something very different to different people.
What you want to elucidate is the action. The verb, not the noun. The action is what takes your core values and brings them to life so people know what they mean. Symbols, acronyms, and other graphic and pneumonic devices are what people resonate with and remember. These will go much further than words written on a whiteboard. Think of some common company logos.
A logo is a symbol of a company’s identity and connects the viewer with the company’s values. The organization’s values, ethics, success or failures, employee satisfaction, and other elements become a part of the logo. When someone – a customer or employee – sees that logo, they see all the things that make up the company. What do you want them to see?
To attract the people you want means to demonstrate your values, your vision, and who and what you truly are, and they, in turn, must display an affinity with your core values.
Core values, people, and traction
Traction comes from aligning every person with your vision. As Gino Wickman, the author of Traction, says, “Vision without traction is merely hallucination.”
But first, you have to develop your vision. A valuable way to do just that is to use the Vision/Traction Organizer. This powerful tool contains eight key questions that help to simplify strategic planning and pull your vision out of your head so you can put it down on paper.
It’s important to roll out EOS and your core values in a way that creates traction. The end goal is to make every person in your company understand how they can support the vision, see themselves as part of it, and share it. You want them to embrace and work toward a common cause and goal.
Doing it right means talking with people, not at them. Actions speak louder than words, so it’s crucial to acknowledge team members who exemplify your core values. Others will gain context, and those who already live the vision can serve as a guiding light.
Sharing core values to gain traction
Leadership is about leading, but it’s also about sharing – sharing your enthusiasm, your passion, and your commitment to your company’s core values.
- Be a role model. If you aren’t a living, breathing example of your core values, how can you expect anyone else to embrace them?
- Set clear expectations. Let team members know what behaviors you expect from them when they onboard. This isn’t about tasks – it’s about the embodiment of core values. And notice the words “team member” as opposed to “employee.” This is important to create a sense of belonging.
- Reinforce your values at all employee touchpoints. Don’t sit in your ivory tower. Meet with every new team member, and make sure your leadership team does the same. Acknowledge their contributions on a regular basis and reward them with something relevant – don’t give someone who doesn’t drink coffee a Starbucks give card.
- Get to know your team members. People are at the core of your success. Make sure they know it. Find out how they want to be treated, what they like, and how their day has been. if it’s a bad one, make sure something is done to perk them up.
It isn’t enough to develop organizational core values. They must be embodied by you and your leadership team and become a part of every interaction. Again, this goes back to personal values and professional values. If it’s important to you, you should be the one communicating it.
Your core values, after all, are the beating heart of your organization. Your job is not to tell people what to do – it’s to show your vision. Those it resonates with are your people, and when the going gets tough, your vision can be relied on to provide the impetus for them to keep going in the push toward growth.
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